The list of email clients iPhoto supports is defined by a handful of AppleScripts in iPhoto.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/. More can be added, and easily. Why more have not been added since 2003 is anybody’s guess.

Some have argued that since < 100% of email clients can be handled by this AppleScript-reliant scheme, the preference should stay put. I say baloney, and the least iPhoto could do is select your preferred email client for you, assuming it’s supported.

Thunderbird is the only non-AppleScriptable email client on OS X, right? And GMail Helper, of course.

Gruber tells me his pet peeve with iPhoto’s preference window is that it’s modal, unlike every other preference window in every other app on the system. Well… every app except iTunes, but at least iTunes’ preferences have the decency to look modal as well as act modal. That whole Windowsy OK/Cancel-button thing is still a bit iffy though.

My reasons for disliking the ‘rotate direction’ preference as a whole come from a series of observations I made of a friend using iPhoto. Not being the type to explore the menu bar willy-nilly (as so few ordinary users are), and certainly not being the type to depress her Option key with any regularity, the only means of rotating an image 90º counterclockwise she could conceive was to rotate it 270º clockwise… three clicks.

Imagine her relief upon discovering a preference for the direction of rotation! Now she only needed to open preferences, change the preference, close preferences, and rotate the image 90º clockwise… five clicks! There are plenty of these Option-key goodies around the place, particularly in the Finder, but damned if any of them has actually ever bothered me like this.

Probably because they don’t have preferences for them.

I’m told the Update preference refers to iPhoto’s clever feature of bugging you with advertisements for the latest paid version of iPhoto, and doesn’t necessarily (I’m yet to have this confirmed) inform you of minor updates at all. Hooray! Nagware! Now there’s even less reason for this preference to exist: the “feature” shouldn’t exist in the first place.